Monitoring Rapid Social Change in Southeastern Mexico

该项目涉及斯坦福大学文化人类学家的民族志研究。该项目旨在监测和比较墨西哥恰帕斯两个高原土著社区发生的经济、政治和人口变化，这些变化已在不同的项目中记录了近30年。1994年，萨帕塔（Zapatista）叛军曾在该地区发动武装叛乱，是墨西哥国家政府和外国观察家高度关注的焦点。待研究的社区是影响整个本区域和拉丁美洲其他类似区域土著社会的更广泛动态的例证。Zinacantan的一个社区500多年来一直是当地的土著精英，并以资本化农业和小企业为特色；另一个在Chamula的人多年来一直缺乏土地，传统上依靠农业工资工作。在这两个社区，最近的经济变化使地方政治派系化，一方面认同国家政党，另一方面认同国家（和国际）宗教传教教派。这两个社区都在沿着传统上固定的种族边界经历新的流动。利用民族志参与者观察的方法，结合1960年代初和1970年代初分别记录的当地社区住户人口普查，调查人员将更新家庭和个人的人口、政治、社会、经济和文化信息。将对这些普查进行协调、计算机化并存入关系数据库，该数据库将与一个当地研究机构经社理事会联系起来，汇编与卫生有关的社会经济数据，供区域规划者使用。该数据集的优势在于相对较长的时间跨度，丰富的民族志描述的文化背景，以及对个人和家庭而不是社区的明确关注。这个项目很重要，因为所收集的数据将被分析人员用来解释该地区在创造就业、社会和政治组织以及宗教皈依方面的不同活动，该地区正在经历动态、快速和爆炸性的变化。对于试图解释事件进程的社会科学家以及试图改变这些趋势的计划者来说，这将是一个非常宝贵的资源。

This project involves the ethnographic research of cultural anthropologists based at Stanford University. The project is to monitor and compare the economic, political and demographic transformations occurring in two highland Chiapas, Mexico indigenous communities whose changes have been charted in separate projects for almost 30 years. This area has seen an armed rebellion by Zapatista rebels in 1994, and is the focus of high interest by the national Mexican government as well as foreign observers. The communities to be studied exemplify broader dynamics affecting indigenous society throughout this region and in other similar regions in Latin America. One community in Zinacantan has been the local indigenous elite for over 500 years, and has differentiated around capitalized farming and small business enterprises; the other in Chamula has been land-poor for many years and has relied traditionally on agrarian wage work. In both communities economic changes have recently factionalized local politics, in one case identifying with national political parties, in the other with national (and international) religious proselytizing sects. Both communities are experiencing new flows along what were traditionally fixed ethnic boundaries. Using methods of ethnographic participant-observation coupled with household-level censuses of local communities that have been recorded since the early 1960s in one case and the early 1970s in another case, the investigators will update demographic, political, social, economic and cultural information on families and individuals. These censuses will be coordinated, computerized, and placed into relational databases, which will be linked with a local research institution ECOSUR, compiling health-related socio-economic data for use by regional planners. The strength of this data set will be the relatively long time span, the rich ethnographically-described cultural context, and the clear focus on individuals and households instead of on communities. This project is important because the data to be gathered will be used by analysts to explain differential activities in job creation, social and political organization, and religious conversions in this region which is undergoing dynamic rapid and explosive change. It will be an immensely valuable resource for social scientists trying to explain the course of events as well as planners trying to modify these trends.